Anyone who read the manga in the 2000s must acknowledge: what this game looks like is how the static manga images came to life in your head. It is of the last things Akira Toriyama did before his death: congratulate the developers for bringing his creation to life so beautifully. Rightfully so. So really one for the fans, because the gameplay is okay, but it doesn't break any pots: it's a typical action game in an open world.

The result is a fun whodunit, but really, the mystery is just a side note. Life is Strange: Reunion is above all a beautiful character study—one that could have easily gone on a bit longer. Our advice: make sure you’ve played the previous games first. Only then will you truly appreciate how beautifully Max and Chloe’s farewell is handled.

An emotional but beautiful storyline. Beautiful graphics. 'Tales of Kenzera: ZAU' is a remarkable game for several reasons. Yet, as a player, you are left a little hungry.

3D platform games are too often intended for kids. Where Mario and co. are a proverbial splash pool, Blue Fire immediately throws the player into an Olympic-sized swimming pool, filled with piranhas and other mischief. The concept of the game is great, unfortunately it is poorly executed.

There is a lot to be pleasantly surprised by The Medium. What Bloober Team has accomplished as a relatively small developer is remarkable, but there’s a drawback to the game. One that makes playing the game a next to schizophrenic experience.

RiMS Racing is full of good intentions, but doesn't really excel in anything. With a little more attention to detail, and with a lot more content, RiMS Racing 2 will probably be a hit. But for now, we remain a bit hungry.

It must have been from caramel and sea salt that two opposites went together so deliciously. This game combines the spectacle and beautiful setting of Horizon with the pure fun of Lego. If it is done with such love every time, may even more games get the Lego treatment.

Maquette is a clever game with some original game mechanics. Playing around with the scale of objects is challenging but fun, however the game also suffers from some technical issues and can even cause motion sickness. But even if that doesn’t bother you, you will reach the end soon – too soon, even for an indie game.

Glyph is set in the desert, which is a little sour for the ball-shaped main character who is allergic to sand. And just to be clear, it's not a "Is that a pimple on my face?" allergy, but one of the "If I hit sand the whole thing explodes" type. So jump, dive and fly, anything to stay out of the sand and accomplish your mission safely. Nice to spend a quarter or maybe even an hour, not enough to convert us to platforming.

Some might see it as an indictment of our current polluting society, others just as a very short and simple platform game with a wafer-thin story and few challenging puzzles that - unlike the titular gunk - doesn't stick around for long.

So why only three stars? Basically, this is a remake of a PlayStation 4 game from 2015, which you could have long bought for next to nothing. This new version looks even better and adds some bells and whistles, but too little to justify the $70 price tag. Many other games from that era were upgraded for the PlayStation 5, costing a dozen euros or often even free. To charge full price for this is money-grubbing.

Jump, swing and solve puzzles. Scarf is a standard puzzle platform game. A fine game, but it doesn't really warm you up. It is a worthy start for a small game studio, but there are still working points.

The game, with its flamboyant characters, fast action and simple controls, at times resembles ‘Wii Sports’ - still one of the best-selling sports games - and that's a compliment. It is also touching how enthusiastic the diverse participants are, whether they win a medal or lose hopelessly. Even in the virtual Olympics, taking part is more important than winning.

It’s not a completely new game, but a collection of older titles. Or rather: the very first Rayman game in five different versions. Versions for the PlayStation, the Atari Jaguar, the Game Boy Color, and more. You do get over 120 bonus levels and extras like a documentary on top of that. Great for nostalgic gamers. Nevertheless, this is a bit of a downer of an anniversary. Due to technical issues, it was practically impossible to play the game smoothly on the Nintendo Switch 2. On multiple occasions, the video and audio completely froze, leaving no choice but to shut it down.

The new 3D matches are indeed better than before, but we still wouldn't call them beautiful. We do think they are better integrated into the whole, and let's be honest: anyone who plays this game isn't looking for pretty graphics. Then there's the new interface. According to the creators, the old one was a mess. We always found our way around it quickly, whereas this time important information is a few clicks too far away. Annoying, but above all: incomprehensible after a year's delay. We also encountered more bugs than we would have liked. What saves the game are the matches: the tactical interface is great and makes matches a joy.

The developers responsible for ‘Soulstice’ took a good look at the ‘Devil May Cry’ series. The dark, sinister atmosphere in the desolate world from the game is spot on, and you almost effortlessly conjure smooth and flashy battles from the controller. So where does it go wrong? In the way the camera works. It is mostly fixed, but jumps between scenes, suddenly taking you in completely the wrong direction. The clumsy and awkward way the game handles this is your most difficult opponent.

Up to 128 players, regardless of whether they play on PC, PS5 or Xbox Series, can take on each other online at the same time in epic battles. Getting that done without too much lag and hiccups is a technical feat and works wonderfully. Too bad the amount of bugs in our test version was too high to make the game really excel.

First the good news: Doom 3 VR edition differs little from the original, and the sinister atmosphere in the dark space base looks sublime even through a virtual reality headset. The bad news? Doom 3 VR edition differs little from the original. The graphics are hopelessly outdated 17 years after its original release, the cutscenes are suddenly no longer in 3D, and a loading screen appears every so often, causing everything to stall and taking you completely out of the game experience.

Gameplay-wise, Gotham Knights contains good ideas, but in practice it’s mostly repetitive. The puzzles are trivial, and the Batcycle feels as nimble as a belt sander over a slab of wood. Even the fights only require the press of a single button. In short: Batman, may you rest in peace. You deserve better than this.

In Oddworld: Soulstorm, a reimagining of the 1998 PS1-classic Abe's Exodus, you play as Abe, a friendly do-gooder who reluctantly becomes some sort of messiah after freeing an enslaved people from their industrial overlords. The story could be read as a criticism of neoliberalism, religious fanaticism and is heavy on themes such as environmentalism and capitalism gone wild. Very relevant. Alas the gameplay doesn’t follow suit.

Looking for a challenge? Then Submerged: hidden depths is not the right game for you. After all, this game is meant to be a quiet adventure, and it is. Maybe even a little too quiet.

The missions offer plenty of variety and are nail-biting at times. You can play them alone, but just about everything makes you feel that this is not the intention: Black Ops 7 is clearly designed to be played with multiple players. The campaign also works much better when you try to achieve your goal with others. We already knew that Call of Duty is primarily a multiplayer extravaganza. Still, we expected a little more here.

The game offers an immersive crusade experience, but thankfully doesn't take itself too seriously. Despite the many severed limbs, there is plenty of room for a dash of humor. Now if the developer could only do something about the large amount of bugs on PS4, they just might have a cult hit up their sleeve.

The characters move stiffly, the animations look like they are from a game from two generations ago, and there is little atmosphere or tension. The voice actors are either overacting or unintentionally soulless. And that's a shame for a game that consists mostly of dialogue. The game is clearly suffering from anemia, and we can only hope for a miraculous cure when ‘Bloodlines 2’ hits the market.

The little brother from the same developer as the Tour de France 2024 game targets a very small niche: cycling fans who can't get enough of details and numbers. Like Football manager, PCM is a manager/simulation game. You don't take your place on the bike yourself, but you do determine every possible detail: you arrange sponsorship contracts, hire trainers and scouts, develop new equipment, determine training schedules, race selections and race strategy. The wet dream for cycling nerds like us, in other words.

After each direct hit, you can see in slow motion and in great detail which trajectory your bullet traveled, where and with what force it hit the animal, which vital organs were pierced and at what point your poor prey died. No gratuitous violence, but a realistic, almost scientific representation of how you killed that innocent pheasant or that cute little deer. After more than three decades of playing video games, there is very little that makes us uncomfortable, but 'Way of the hunter' occasionally made us gulp.

There is much to appreciate about Sons of Sparta. Given that it now takes six years or more to make a big game like God of War, this interlude is very welcome. What's more, Sony Santa Monica isn't taking the easy route by sending Kratos on an adventure in a genre that's new to him. Kudos for that! But within that genre, our favorite demigod suddenly finds himself in crowded company. The “Metroidvania” genre has been enjoying a revival in recent years thanks to Hollow Knight, Ori and the Will of the Wisps, and Prince of Persia. To compete with them, you have to come up with something special. Sons of Sparta is commendable and certainly has an edge for God of War fans, but it lacks that touch of magic to make it indispensable.

Forspoken is somewhat reminiscent of the fusion cuisine that caused a furor in the average bistro in the early 1990s...The result is a potpourri of uncomfortably poorly written dialogue, a giant open world of cardboard and struggling to find 'meh' action and combat.

King's Bounty II may not be the most original or visually impressive game we've gotten to play lately, but it does manage to translate a typically childlike fantasy to the screen. And childlike fantasy is just the thing everyone can use on occasion.

Where Chocobo GP really goes off the rails is in the way it demands money from the player. The game already costs full price, but also works with a season pass and microtransactions for all sorts of extras that should have been in the base game in the first place. Illustrating this is how Chocobo GP puts Cloud and Squall deep behind the pay wall. It's like you can only race Mario and Bowser in Mario Kart after opening your wallet.

To become a fixture like Fortnite, though, Destruction Allstars needs more content than its current four game modes and handful of courses. In any case, Lucid Games has already announced plans to continually expand and improve the game at least during its first year, so the future looks bright for PS5 owners.

The biggest problem with Twin mirror is the lack of pace. When a game that only takes about six hours to complete often feels boring, you know something is fundamentally wrong. Luckily the game also does several things well, which is what made us keep playing.

35 years after its original release, 'Alex Kidd in Miracle World' is being re-released in a polished version that feels wonderfully nostalgic. Aside from some additional dialogue, levels and modified boss battles, it's still essentially the same game as it was in 1986. While we praise the way the player can now seamlessly switch between the new and original graphics, it feels like a missed opportunity not to change some of the basics. The controls are still as clunky as they were back then, and the unforgiving difficulty level still causes a lot of frustration today. Fortunately, there is the ability to use infinite lives, otherwise many controllers would perish.

A huge missed opportunity. That's what is left after playing "Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. What could have been an epic superhero game turned into an extremely mediocre shooter of thirteen in a dozen.

Is it due to the fact that the game is released on both the previous and current generation gaming consoles, which limited the developers? The game takes itself very seriously, and we can't imagine that they deliberately left one of the most annoying elements of the previous console generation - the many (hidden) loading screens - in the game unless there was a technical need for it. Add to that the wooden and terribly dated character and facial animations, and the result at least does not live up to what you should expect from a video game anno 2024.

Spacebase Startopi’ taught us that aliens are just like people - they're cranky if they don't get a latte in time, tweet about their day and leave a giant pile of trash behind - and that running a space station is damn hard work. The game won't achieve the same cult status as the original, but as a strategic building game that doesn't take itself too seriously, it's good for several hours of solo and multiplayer fun.

Shooting, sprinting, and tactically maneuvering across the playing field to cunningly (or flashily) kill other players: it is and always will be addictive. And as ever, the game also tickles your reptilian brain with sounds and messages - Killstreak! Payback! Savior! + 120 XP!!! This works so effectively that a slot machine in Vegas could learn a thing or two from a console game. But when after two addictive hours the fog of war has cleared around your head, you have to conclude: actually, I've played this thirteen times in a dozen. It looks better than it did in 2010, but in essence it is unchanged, just like that fast food burger that has also tasted exactly the same for years.

The result is a game with no identity of its own. Redfall simultaneously wants to be a looter shooter like Borderlands, in an open world like Fallout's, with action like Dying light and a lengthy multiplayer experience like Destiny. But it fails on all counts. The game environments are bleakly empty, the gameplay is wooden. Like the vampires from the world of Redfall, the game has no soul.

In theory, the story lends itself to a lot of nuance, but there are hardly any moral choices in the game. It makes your actions feel rather pointless and the game seems one long rollercoaster full of battles. If those fights were nice, we wouldn't have minded at all. But they're not.

Override 2 practically omitted the campaign mode. The obligatory single player experience is nothing more than a meager from zero to hero story, and the game focuses on the battles. This could've been a good thing if the battles happened to be more daring.

Rarely have we been left so disappointed after gaming as after playing 'Necromunda: hired gun'. And that's a shame, because on paper the game has everything to be a hit.

Our expectations for Babylon's fall were sky high. A collaboration between legendary publisher Square Enix and developer PlatinumGames, a few years ago responsible for the masterful 'NieR: automata', that could only produce fireworks, right? Unfortunately, fireworks that end with a whimper.

Playing Balan Wonderworld is like looking forward to a virtuous hot shower after a long and hard day of work, only to find that there is only cold water: a big and unfortunate disappointment.

At times the game reminds you of classic first person shooters like Heretic and Quake, but without the shooting. Escape from Naraka in fact does it without weapons. Original and refreshing, but frustrating to jump from platform to platform in this perspective, when monsters can kill you with a single blow. The atmosphere in the game is good, but when you reach the end after barely two hours of play and are only relieved that the game is already over, something is thoroughly wrong.

'Clone' is rarely a good category to be categorized in, yet Nickelodeon All-star Brawl is a creditable fighting game. Nintendo’s Super Smash Bros: Ultimate still offers more value for money, but the mechanics and gameplay of All-star Brawl are surprisingly good. If you are looking for a decent platformer or are a hardcore fan of the genre, you should definitely give the game a try.

This Limited edition is a physical edition with a lot of goodies, but it mainly bundles the excellent base game in which you play with Cuphead and little brother Mugman, and the expansion The delicious last course. In addition to a new play environment and new challenges, this one brings with Ms. Chalice - it stays after a cup, mug and now a chalice in the theme of china - also a new playable character. Together they are good for at least 15 hours of proverbial self-mutilation of the funniest kind.

What is successful, however, is the way you are forced to go outside the game. Googling answers, looking up articles on news sites, decoding images and audio clips, searching Twitter, delving into source files and deciphering codes. You do it all, although you have to know your way around the Internet and your PC. Acolyte is an intriguing and original detective game, but due to the high technological threshold not for everyone.

There is nothing wrong with being inspired, and many movies and games are variations on existing themes. But ‘Palworld’ adds nothing original and there is more than a hint of plagiarism about it. This chaotic bastard child in which creatures can not only be deployed as soldiers or slaves but also horribly tortured caused nothing but annoyance for yours truly. But look, tens of millions of players appear to like it after all, so there is indeed a market and an audience for it. Fascinating, but that still doesn't make it a good, original game. [Early Access Score = 20]

The game occupies a rather strange place on the spectrum. On the one hand, it wants to be a racing game, where you control your own rider and determine how fast he drives, when he sits in time trial position and how he cuts corners. However, a cyclist is not a car, and the controls feel rather clumsy at first. It gets easier as you persevere, but we suspect many players will soon drop out.

Slay the Spire II isn’t exactly a revolution: the framework of the original remains intact, but there are so many new cards and the new characters are so unique that we’re already completely hooked and frantically searching for ways to “break” the game by finding crazy card combos. The new feature we were most looking forward to was multiplayer: from now on, you can team up with other players to take down monsters. That requires a lot of coordination, especially when playing with three or four people, but wow: it adds a whole new dimension. In case it wasn’t clear: we would have rather played Slay the Spire II than written this piece. Though that’s not entirely true: we think this game is so good that we believe everyone should try it, and we’re happy to recommend it. Your wallet will barely feel it: you can get started for just 25 euros. [Early Access Score = 100]